Media and Disability 1997 Abstracts
Media and Disability Interest Group
The Americans with Disabilities Act: Defining Deaf People and Their Rights • Mark Heil Borchert, University of Colorado • While safeguarding the rights of the deaf and other groups of persons with disabilities, the policies of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) also provide a particular interpretation of these groups and their rights. Based on analysis of the ADA and the discourse surrounding it, as well as interviews with leaders of organizations serving deaf and hearing-impaired persons, this paper explores the definitions of the deaf and their rights implicit in this law. It suggests that the law addresses deafness as an inability and the rights of the deaf in terms of their integration into mainstream American society. These definitions, however, are problematic for some deaf leaders who argue that the deaf community is a cultural and linguistic minority and that policies of integration can be threatening to this subculture.
Images of Mental Retardation in American Film: Narratives, Semiotics, and Historical Perspectives • Patrick Devlieger, Tal Baz and Carlos Drazen, Illinois-Chicago • This paper reviews ten American films in which persons with mental retardation are depicted. Using interpretation and comparison, two essential questions drive the analysis in this paper: What is mental retardation, and what is rehabilitation in the context of these films. Using narrative analysis, semiotics, and historical comparison, mental retardation is at times tragedy, a burden, or a dimension that helps to understand the essentials in life. Rehabilitation is radical exclusion, a phantasy, truth, interconnection.
Are You Letting Your Mental Health Problems Hurt Him?: Advice to Women About Mental Health and Illness in Women’s Magazines, 1960-1990 • Carol Brooks Gardner, Indiana University • A thematic analysis of more than 15 women’s magazines directed to women from 1960 to 1990 yielded several themes: the trivialization of potentially important and serious mental symptoms; the subordination of women’s health problems, both major and minor, to those of others around them, especially their boyfriends or husbands; and the same emphasis on a cure rather than on normalization of a disability that is found in the rehabilitative model of understanding physical disabilities. In this paper, I place this topic in the existing literature on media and disability. I also suggest the use of sociologists Ibarra and Kitsuse’s (1990, 1991) framework of rhetorics applied to social problems as especially helpful when analyzing mental disabilities and gender. I term the overriding rhetoric reflected in the popular magazine articles as, by and large, a rhetoric of gendered incompetence.
Community Structural Pluralism and Local Newspaper Coverage of Ethnic Minority Groups and Americans With Disabilities • Douglas Blanks Hindman, North Dakota State University, Ann Preston, Quincy University, Robert Littlefield, North Dakota State University, Dennis Neumann, North Dakota State University • This study examines how editors’ perspectives on coverage of ethnic minorities and Americans with disabilities are shaped by the nature of their communities. Findings indicate that editors from more pluralistic communities place higher value on news about ethnic and other minorities, and a lower value on stories about Americans with Disabilities. Local newspapers appear to be more responsive to the majority groups’ interests than those of the excluded groups.
From Pity to Pride: People with Disabilities, The Media, and an Emerging Disability Culture • Miho Iwakuma, University of Oklahoma • In recent years, the media coverage of people with disabilities has changed from seeing them as objects of pity to people with equal rights like others. This paper examines several turning points in the past, which had significant impacts on people with disabilities in the media. These incidents mentioned in the paper are: the disability rights movement, the protest of the Gallaudet University students, and regulating the Americans with Disability Act. The studies done by Clogston and Haller also suggest that the media depiction of people with disabilities has changed from the traditional models to the progressive models, especially since the Gallaudet University student protest. In addition, the paper talks about a relationship between the media and the disability culture • the common sentiment held among people with disabilities. Finally, the study mentions how other countries, such as Japan, are interrelated with the U.S. media through global networks, and how the Japanese media has changed portrayals of people with disabilities.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and His Disability: The Chicago Tribune and the 1936 Election • Darlene Jirikowic, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee • President Franklin Roosevelt, with the help of the Washington press corps, successfully shrouded his disability by managing the visual images that were transmitted to the nation. The President, however, had much less control over print stories. My research investigated whether the conservative slant of a newspaper revealed itself in negative, verbal references about Roosevelt’s paralysis. Methodology focused on a comparative content analysis of campaign stories in both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune for one month preceding the 1936 election. Neither paper alluded to FDR’s handicap, though, apparently, for different reasons.
A Search for Indications of Disability Culture in Magazines Marketed to the Disability Community • Jeffrey Alan John, Wright State University • The purpose of this paper is to report results of a study that sought to identify subjects or subject matter that could be construed as indicators of a specific or unique disability culture. As its methodology the study employed a preliminary content analysis of publications that seek as their readership people with disabilities. Results provide at least some evidence of generally accepted prerequisites of culture, such as tools and technology, a largely shared value system in support of the individual with a disability, and a prioritization of events and information that promote interaction within the disability community.
Containment of Image: Critical Theory and Perspectives on Disability in the Media • Robert K. Kalwinsky, University of Iowa • Using critical theory to ground examination, this paper represents a first step toward exploring the macro level concerns informing media accounts of the disabled. It approaches the stereotypical formations and shallow descriptions of most portrayals through examination of ideological factors that intercalate with cultural forms. The results are then analyzed in terms of the potential for emancipatory media depictions and the concomitant political/economic formations that are entailed in constructing this potential.
Hand-Ling Media Research on Disability: Toward including a Feminist Exile Perspective on Theory and Practice • Catherine L. Marston, University of Iowa • In this paper, I will emphasize the relevance of a disability perspective to feminist theory and feminist media research. I detail the incompleteness of feminist theory without a disability perspective. I then discuss the space in feminist media studies for this perspective. Lastly, I suggest a preliminary program of research Ñ exploring the areas of representations of disability in the mainstream and alternative media, as well as disability in the journalistic and academic workplaces.
Coverage of Presidential Illness and Disability • Ann E. Preston, Quincy University • A peculiarly unhealthy group, most U. S. presidents have failed to reach their life expectancies. Of the last 19 presidents, 14 have experienced illness or disability while in the White House. Journalistic folklore and scholars blame media for complicity in concealing presidential infirmity, while popular writers state that presidential health is coming under ever closer scrutiny. Little evidence exists to support either perspective. To address the lack of evidence, this research examined Time magazine coverage of presidential illness and disability for presidents Roosevelt through Bush. Surprisingly, media interest in presidential health has waned rather than waxed as time progressed, but the information being provided may be more explicit than it was earlier in this century. Coverage reassures the nation of the president’s health more than it reveals uncertainty about prognoses, especially for those presidents who underwent major health risks while in office. Journalists are remarkably unsuspicious of presidents’ physiological fitness to serve.
Disability Publication Demographics and Coverage Models • Lillie S. Ransom, University of Maryland • This paper is a summary of two aspects of a larger study that analyzes how disability publications may help forge group identity for people with disabilities. It reports the circulation, target audience, editor demographics, and distribution information for fifty-six (56) disability publications. It also describes the editors’ perceptions of coverage of disability issues. Methodology: A mail survey was used to ascertain 56 editors’ perceptions about their disability publications. In addition, a random subset of 12 editors were interviewed about disability related concepts and coverage issues. Conclusions: 131 disability publications identified disability publications fit into Clogston’s (1990) progressive/civil rights model of disability coverage, three models of coverage were discerned: activist/ political; assimilationist/mainstreaming; and special interest publications.
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